The present invention relates to a discriminator for discriminating between handwritten and machine-printed characters recorded on a document such as mail.
A ZIP code written on the mail is recognized with an optical character reader (OCR). The numerals of such ZIP code are usually handwritten or machine-printed. For recognizing the machine-printed character, the similarity of their overall shapes is used for the judgment criterion. On the other hand, the similarity of the handwritten character is determined on the basis of the feature of "unit line" such as horizontal, vertical or slanted lines. The slanted lines include lines with the right or left end up, and springing up at the end. For effective recognition, there have been provided two OCR's for the respective handwritten and machine-printed character recognitions. However, no technique has not been proposed for discriminating between the two. Handwritten characters are, therefore, often processed with the OCR for machine-printed characters, resulting in error recognition.
If it is known before the recognition with OCR whether the characters are machine-printed or handwritten, such error recognition can be avoided, thereby to increase the processing speed.